I'm glad they're putting money into medical research, but I kinda roll my eyes when people make big claims about curing X, especially when X is something incredibly broad like "cancer" or in this case, "all diseases." AI/ML has barely scratched the surface of its potential in medicine, however, I find it naive to think that you can throw AI/ML at any random disease and always get a cure. Even after a century. Will we have a cure for trisomy 21? For antisocial personality disorder? For obesity and addiction? These things are far more complicated than just creating the right drug.
But as much as I'm rolling my eyes at their blanket statement, the spirit of "yes we can!" does way more for science and progress than naysay of critics.
People would have rolled their eyes, if someone said. I wanted to connect the world. I want to connect virutally everyone, where you can just reach anyone at anyplace at any time for cheap.
30 yrs ago, in a different part of the world. My father had to catch a bus from a village to the city, then catch a plane to a major city to make international phone call to the US to his business partners. Today, people in that same village can sign on to HN and reply to this very post. Or tweet and facebook real time.
Maybe they won't be the one to solve it, maybe it would take a bit longer, who knows? Gotta give it a shot. Maybe we won't cure all the disease. Perhaps we eliminate 85%. That would be great too. Stay optimistic my friend.
I think the current medical research system is badly broken in several ways, and it's possible that a few billions spent on alternative approaches would bear a lot of fruit.
It might also not, but I'm very glad if someone tries.
Without disagreeing with your point, there are actually currently gene therapies to cure trisomy 21 [1] (a clever trick of affixing the signal that is used to silence a (female's)/the (male's) X chromosome to the 3rd of the 21st chromosomes). I don't think it's all the way through FDA approval, and is still very much experimental, but is exactly the kind of thing that is curable. And that is where your point stands: it is hard to know which unknowns are easy unknowns, and which unknowns are nearly impossible unknowns because both are currently of the same quality - unknown. The grandiose claim is fancy, and much will be accomplished in 80 years, but even ill-defined language of 'disease' and 'cure' belies our ignorance.
Here's my best prediction for how it's could happen: when the all human immune systems are able to learn from each other, we'll be most of the way there. The immune system is at the center of most human diseases. Cancer? It's the best solution. Infection? Best solution. Autoimmune disease?Fixing the immune system would be the best solution to autoimmune disease. Right now, if you want your body to be immune to something, you're immune system has to learn that particular immunity. If we can form an artificial immune system "culture" then it seems like learning could be much, much faster.
I, for one, am imagining a news item 84 years into the future - "how letting people share lunch pictures and stalk other people has led to the eradication of all diseases".
The history of technology is filled with cross pollinations of that kind - ex: GPUs invented for high quality 3D amusement being used for AI and protein folding research.
One would roll one's eyes if someone promised to fix every single bug in a vast, buggy, fifty-year old software project.
But just ending cancer would essentially be a project for externally ameliorating, not even fixing, the bugs of 4 billion years of (genetic) code, code that "just happened" with "bugs" that survived because they weren't selected against.
The skepticism is totally warranted, but you have to really consider the strides made in just 100 years. There's practically a Moore's Law of medicine happening.
We're still really dumb about a lot of things related to natural mortality, but exponentially smarter and more capable than we were 50 and then 200 years ago.
General-purpose nanorobotics would pretty much allow us to do arbitrary medical procedures with cell-level accuracy. Cancer would be easy. Modifying brain structure would be easy. Pretty much everything would be easy.
I'm the opposite, I always roll my eyes when doctors say that AI/ML will never replace human doctors, or at least that it can never replace their human intuition or empathy. Human intuition is exactly what will be superseded by machine learning. I know empathy is important, and I read something about lonely people being less likely to have a fast recovery, but it just isn't all that important for accurate diagnoses or treatment.
So, I think the interesting question is--take them at their word, and what do we then do with the resulting population explosion?
It's kinda like efforts to modernize (read: give Western lifestyles to) a lot of South Asia and Africa...a lot of pollution and ecological destruction that is probably not a good thing.
" For antisocial personality disorder? For obesity and addiction?"
If we have a hypothetical scheme to find out all drugs that can be found, and see that the cure for those is not there, that is as a conclusive contribution into finding cure to those ailments as finding a cure. Most biggest discoveries are not about going on a beeline to a solution as a race. Rather, one is charting an unknown territory. As the unknown part shrinks, one does not need to spend energy in stumbling there and concentrate on other areas, finally reaching a solution (if a solution can be found).
"Andy later discovers that he has pelvic cancer, and has approximately one year to live if the hip and leg are not removed. In desperation he sneaks into Stephen's lab and injects himself with the nanobots"
...
"The nanobots continue making "improvements" to Andy, including giving him eyes in the back of his head, bones above his stomach, keen hearing, and jellyfish-like stinging tentacles on his skin."
Probably not feasible without some genetic re-engineering to design out vulnerabilities to common diseases. That's how aging will probably be solved. There's a big debug time problem, though. It takes about two generations to be sure you got it right. We'll probably have very long lived mice decades before it works for humans. (Many cancers in mice can be cured now. This doesn't translate to humans.)
Then there will be species conflicts. Merck people won't be able to mate with Novartis people because they'll be too different genetically.
> Then there will be species conflicts. Merck people won't be able to mate with Novartis people because they'll be too different genetically.
I don't think this will be a problem if you get to the point of genetically engineering people. You just can't mate the old fashioned way, but if anything that's a benefit- free birth control. IVF + genetic modification of the egg cell, assuming your technology is that advanced, should be the easy solution.
I read in some article of the Google equivalent version of this, Calico, that even if you cure all of cancer the average life expectancy will probably only increase by ~5 years (off the top of my head, can't find link).
This is difficult to say without sounding snarky, but will 'all disease' include the mental disorders (both discovered and undiscovered) that Facebook inflicts upon its users? Depression from seeing other people's perfect lives, obsessive compulsive dopamine-fueled update checking to maximize Zuck's ad revenue etc.
I'm glad he's spending his money this way but how about the way he makes it. Facebook is not a particularly benign product and when you throw in the rising privacy, censorship, and "Free Basics" concerns, I would argue it's creeping towards having a net negative impact on the world.
I would have much more respect for Zuckerberg if he took a profit hit to fix his product and how his company interacts with the world. It's worth noting that Bill stepped away from Microsoft before he got deeply into philanthropy, in part to avoid conflict of interest. He knew he had a checkered past and he made a break with it. Zuck has a checkered present. Curing diseases in the developing world while pushing your product on it at the same time is somewhat morally ambiguous in my view.
I'm pretty sure the majority of people disagree with you on the value of Facebook. I know I do. I certainly disagree with the claim that Facebook "inflicts" mental disorders on its users.
So I'm not sure how you expect Mark Zuckerberg to "fix" a problem with his product that he probably doesn't think exists.
And may I add that, if every time someone decides to donate money to charity, people "beat up" on them, it's a pretty big disincentive to donate to charity.
I agree, social media is creating new social disorders and providing a platform for people to knowingly or unknowingly destroy their lives. Facebook enables people to display a very skewed version of reality and enough of that in someone's social circle leads to feelings of failure, unworthiness, depression, rejection etc. So whilst this is not a disease to be cured, it is still a health issue.
Pharmacology is an interesting example where better technology and scientific understanding have made things worse than earlier, low-tech methods ("inject plant extracts into animals and see what happens").
The number of new drugs discovered per dollar of research has been dropping since 1960, and obvious explanations (like "the easy ones have already been found") turn out not to explain the phenomenon. [http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1....]
This is something we should try to understand better, since it goes against the intuition that technology is an unalloyed good in scientific research.
I applaud the money they're spending, but the level of technophilia in the announcement gives me pause.
I can't speak for the past, but I think the big deal for the testing of the future will be shifting from "forty percent of the test subjects responded positively to the drug; none of the side effects were that bad" to "80% of test subjects carrying thought-to-be-marginally-relevant gene Y showed positive responses to the drug but none carrying gene Yvariant; those also carrying not-suspected-of-be-relevant gene X exhibited much stronger side effects"
That should make initial testing a lot more expensive, but in the long run launches of new drugs less risky.
If this initiative funds studies on non-profitable treatments (fasting, nutrition) or counter balance industry backed lobbying, they will earn my respect. But if its to dump money on AI, yes its just sad. Google and Facebook AI can't fight the most basic spam. Seeing the same tools curing cancer even in the long run is a little bit far fetched ...
Returns on R&D have been falling across a wide range of disciplines for a long time. Joseph Tainter references work by several other authors, looking at patents and Nobel Prize awards. J. Doyne Farmer and the late John C. Holland both work in the are of technological innovation as well.
I'm not convinced technology and understanding are the causal factors here.
the 'better than the Beatles' problem is at least superficially compelling. When Benadryl was discovered, the bar for allergy drugs was pretty low. Today you have to improve on drugs that have several advantages over Benadryl (and cost ~$0.50 a day OTC in the US).
Not to take the wind out of anyone's sails, but there is a concern to be raised about relying more and more on charities to fund the public good. When a democratically elected government funds the public good, at least in theory, the public at large has a small say in choosing what counts as "public good". When you leave it to charity, you're relying on the morals of individual wealthy donors to decide what counts as a "public good". I don't claim to know which method is more risky in terms of mis-allocation of resources, but it's something to think about.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not a charitable trust or a private foundation but a limited liability company which can be for-profit, spend money on lobbying, make political donations, will not have to disclose its pay to its top five executives and have fewer other transparency requirements, compared to a charitable trust. Under this legal structure, as Forbes wrote it, "Zuckerberg will still control the Facebook shares owned by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative".
I know it's more of a western problem, but it would be good if someone could find some real solutions to the obesity crisis.
If you ask many GPs in the west they will tell you that a majority of illnesses they address are related to weight and diet. With an aging, increasingly overweight adult population alongside a sharp rise in child obesity come big consequences for health care over the next half century.
Im not saying its an easy task you can just throw money at, but if trends continue as they are now the health and economic impact on society will be huge.
Bar some sort of national catastrophe (for e.g. war, famine, disease) is it a crazy idea to think we could see a reduction in obesity levels? Are we simply resigned to the fact that we will just get bigger and bigger in the future?
The absolutely crazy thing is that in this day and age the vast majority of diagnosed paediatric cancers are not sequenced (no germline, tumor or RNA seq) It actually makes me feel quite sick that there is so much information out there that is not being mined or analyzed.
I hope this money does not go into some sort of "in 100 years from now moonshot" as opposed to, we have huge urgent needs for money right now.
These self-congratulatory billionaire philanthropists and their tax evasion schemes really irk me. Everything won't be peachy in the future. We're well on our way to warm up the planet by 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, because of the globalized world in which you could gain your fortune. Stop exerting power of money that doesn't belong to you, pay your taxes like everyone else, and maybe governments would have more means to improve issues that were democratically prioritized, with more oversight. These flashy single issues funds with vague goals are mainly there to serve the ego of whoever funded them.
Most infectious diseases in humans are known to have originated from wildlife, so eradicating all current diseases will still leave us with new diseases entering the human population. Current rate at which new diseases establish themselves in the human population is about ~1 per year, moreso under unstable climate [Greger, Woolhouse].
Looks like Chan and Zuckerberg's initiative on infectious diseases is focused on a rapid response once a disease establishes itself in humans. There is certainly a lot to win there, but it is still acting after the fact, rather than prevention. Would have liked part of the effort to be focused on monitoring wildlife to understand which diseases are at risk of jumping over.
Not sure why there is a lot of negativity here. It doesn't seem that ridiculous of a goal. I think by 2100 we will have extremely powerful AI that will make fighting diseases extremely easy compared to methods available today. To be honest, it seems like an achievable goal.
This is great. Great achievements as a startup founder and now philanthropy.
For those comparing this to pharma companies. Pharma companies invest in drugs that they can make money with. It sounds as though this $3 billion is aiming at more general research and making it publicly available.
But he is in a much better position to work on the curious problems of ever increasing political polarization in our new Post-Factual world.
If I were to guess, over the next century that problem is going to result is a vastly more misery than a slight speed up to medical technology could compensate for.
I would never discourage them, audacious goals are how real change is achieved.
But in the history of the world, every time you conquer one disease, a worse and scarier one seems to fill the void. And if you wanted to get pedantic, it could be said that Humanity is a disease of the Earth. Eliminating that infestation might qualify under the goal. Perhaps AI is not going to solve the problem by eliminating disease, but eliminating that which can be diseased. Kill the prey, and the predator dies.
I just feel this is too broad and unbounded. They should have focused on a specific diseases and a shorter timeframe. By 2100 most of us will be long dead by current standards.
Mark Zuckerberg is worth 55 billion dollars. This is 5% of his net worth.
Mark Zuckerberg spent 20bn on Whatsapp. At his 28% shareholding in facebook that's a 5.6bn USD personal commitment.
The top 5 global pharma companies spent 42 billion USD on R&D in 2015 alone. Total pharma sector R&D is circa 200 yards. Every singe year. They aren't anywhere near "curing all diseases". This intiative would fund them for 5 days.
So lets say this were possible. Where would be the best place to throw this money? Just researching X disease one by one isn't going to be successful. There are not enough resources available to make that happen that way. Period.
So what if a big leap in computational biology happened? Making faster machines is relatively easier and largely unregulated.
So you focus on simulating disease and some form of automation that tries to cure it. We have the problem of building these models for the computer to crunch on. So why not build them from people. Continuously monitor everything about someone. DNA, the various omics, self reports. All the while machine learning is trying learn these models. So other automations can change them.
So the first thing we need is a way to collect all this data. Itself a major medical breakthrough. How much data do we need to build the models? This seems to be the first breakthrough we need to even approach this.
Feeling so privileged right now; what a great time to be alive and see such visionary leadership. Thank you Mark, Priscilla, Bill, and the thousands of people whose names I don't know who work tirelessly on these problems.
[+] [-] kendallpark|9 years ago|reply
But as much as I'm rolling my eyes at their blanket statement, the spirit of "yes we can!" does way more for science and progress than naysay of critics.
[+] [-] segmondy|9 years ago|reply
30 yrs ago, in a different part of the world. My father had to catch a bus from a village to the city, then catch a plane to a major city to make international phone call to the US to his business partners. Today, people in that same village can sign on to HN and reply to this very post. Or tweet and facebook real time.
Maybe they won't be the one to solve it, maybe it would take a bit longer, who knows? Gotta give it a shot. Maybe we won't cure all the disease. Perhaps we eliminate 85%. That would be great too. Stay optimistic my friend.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|9 years ago|reply
It might also not, but I'm very glad if someone tries.
[+] [-] toufka|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.biospace.com/News/down-syndromes-extra-chromosome...
[+] [-] dhbradshaw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sriku|9 years ago|reply
The history of technology is filled with cross pollinations of that kind - ex: GPUs invented for high quality 3D amusement being used for AI and protein folding research.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|9 years ago|reply
But just ending cancer would essentially be a project for externally ameliorating, not even fixing, the bugs of 4 billion years of (genetic) code, code that "just happened" with "bugs" that survived because they weren't selected against.
[+] [-] nkozyra|9 years ago|reply
We're still really dumb about a lot of things related to natural mortality, but exponentially smarter and more capable than we were 50 and then 200 years ago.
[+] [-] MasterScrat|9 years ago|reply
Relevant PHD Comics about how "there will never be a cure for cancer":
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php/archive_print.ph...
[+] [-] wyager|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user731955373|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathan_f77|9 years ago|reply
Further reading from Vinod Khosla: http://fortune.com/2012/12/04/technology-will-replace-80-of-...
[+] [-] angersock|9 years ago|reply
It's kinda like efforts to modernize (read: give Western lifestyles to) a lot of South Asia and Africa...a lot of pollution and ecological destruction that is probably not a good thing.
[+] [-] fredgrott|9 years ago|reply
Mark was reacting to this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994798/
[+] [-] fsloth|9 years ago|reply
If we have a hypothetical scheme to find out all drugs that can be found, and see that the cure for those is not there, that is as a conclusive contribution into finding cure to those ailments as finding a cure. Most biggest discoveries are not about going on a beeline to a solution as a race. Rather, one is charting an unknown territory. As the unknown part shrinks, one does not need to spend energy in stumbling there and concentrate on other areas, finally reaching a solution (if a solution can be found).
[+] [-] nso95|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbcbasic|9 years ago|reply
TLDR:
"Andy later discovers that he has pelvic cancer, and has approximately one year to live if the hip and leg are not removed. In desperation he sneaks into Stephen's lab and injects himself with the nanobots" ... "The nanobots continue making "improvements" to Andy, including giving him eyes in the back of his head, bones above his stomach, keen hearing, and jellyfish-like stinging tentacles on his skin."
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
Then there will be species conflicts. Merck people won't be able to mate with Novartis people because they'll be too different genetically.
[+] [-] jychang|9 years ago|reply
I don't think this will be a problem if you get to the point of genetically engineering people. You just can't mate the old fashioned way, but if anything that's a benefit- free birth control. IVF + genetic modification of the egg cell, assuming your technology is that advanced, should be the easy solution.
[+] [-] qsymmachus|9 years ago|reply
I think I'll stick with cancer for now
[+] [-] rawnlq|9 years ago|reply
I read in some article of the Google equivalent version of this, Calico, that even if you cure all of cancer the average life expectancy will probably only increase by ~5 years (off the top of my head, can't find link).
[+] [-] dredmorbius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidcool|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apatters|9 years ago|reply
I'm glad he's spending his money this way but how about the way he makes it. Facebook is not a particularly benign product and when you throw in the rising privacy, censorship, and "Free Basics" concerns, I would argue it's creeping towards having a net negative impact on the world.
I would have much more respect for Zuckerberg if he took a profit hit to fix his product and how his company interacts with the world. It's worth noting that Bill stepped away from Microsoft before he got deeply into philanthropy, in part to avoid conflict of interest. He knew he had a checkered past and he made a break with it. Zuck has a checkered present. Curing diseases in the developing world while pushing your product on it at the same time is somewhat morally ambiguous in my view.
[+] [-] edanm|9 years ago|reply
So I'm not sure how you expect Mark Zuckerberg to "fix" a problem with his product that he probably doesn't think exists.
And may I add that, if every time someone decides to donate money to charity, people "beat up" on them, it's a pretty big disincentive to donate to charity.
[+] [-] estefan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therealbobsmoot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] norswap|9 years ago|reply
(*) Not to be confused with depressive disorder, a clinical condition that Facebook cannot create on its own.
[+] [-] idlewords|9 years ago|reply
The number of new drugs discovered per dollar of research has been dropping since 1960, and obvious explanations (like "the easy ones have already been found") turn out not to explain the phenomenon. [http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1....]
This is something we should try to understand better, since it goes against the intuition that technology is an unalloyed good in scientific research.
I applaud the money they're spending, but the level of technophilia in the announcement gives me pause.
[+] [-] notahacker|9 years ago|reply
That should make initial testing a lot more expensive, but in the long run launches of new drugs less risky.
[+] [-] tangue|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|9 years ago|reply
I'm not convinced technology and understanding are the causal factors here.
[+] [-] maxerickson|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroom%27s_Law
the 'better than the Beatles' problem is at least superficially compelling. When Benadryl was discovered, the bar for allergy drugs was pretty low. Today you have to improve on drugs that have several advantages over Benadryl (and cost ~$0.50 a day OTC in the US).
[+] [-] mmaunder|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandrake|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitL|9 years ago|reply
---
From Wikipedia:
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not a charitable trust or a private foundation but a limited liability company which can be for-profit, spend money on lobbying, make political donations, will not have to disclose its pay to its top five executives and have fewer other transparency requirements, compared to a charitable trust. Under this legal structure, as Forbes wrote it, "Zuckerberg will still control the Facebook shares owned by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative".
[+] [-] calsy|9 years ago|reply
If you ask many GPs in the west they will tell you that a majority of illnesses they address are related to weight and diet. With an aging, increasingly overweight adult population alongside a sharp rise in child obesity come big consequences for health care over the next half century.
Im not saying its an easy task you can just throw money at, but if trends continue as they are now the health and economic impact on society will be huge.
Bar some sort of national catastrophe (for e.g. war, famine, disease) is it a crazy idea to think we could see a reduction in obesity levels? Are we simply resigned to the fact that we will just get bigger and bigger in the future?
[+] [-] a13n|9 years ago|reply
http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/21/mark-zuckerberg-and-prisci...
[+] [-] sams99|9 years ago|reply
I hope this money does not go into some sort of "in 100 years from now moonshot" as opposed to, we have huge urgent needs for money right now.
[+] [-] bwindels|9 years ago|reply
The school of life has a good video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTAE5m3ZO2E
[+] [-] BorisVSchmid|9 years ago|reply
http://czbiohub.org/projects/infectious-disease/
Looks like Chan and Zuckerberg's initiative on infectious diseases is focused on a rapid response once a disease establishes itself in humans. There is certainly a lot to win there, but it is still acting after the fact, rather than prevention. Would have liked part of the effort to be focused on monitoring wildlife to understand which diseases are at risk of jumping over.
Greger, M.Crit. Rev. Microbiol. 33, 243–299 (2007). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18033595
Woolhouse, M .E.J. Trends Microbiol. 10, s3–s7 (2002). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12377561
[+] [-] hmate9|9 years ago|reply
I wish Zuckerberg and Chan the best in this.
[+] [-] tschellenbach|9 years ago|reply
For those comparing this to pharma companies. Pharma companies invest in drugs that they can make money with. It sounds as though this $3 billion is aiming at more general research and making it publicly available.
[+] [-] whybroke|9 years ago|reply
But he is in a much better position to work on the curious problems of ever increasing political polarization in our new Post-Factual world.
If I were to guess, over the next century that problem is going to result is a vastly more misery than a slight speed up to medical technology could compensate for.
[+] [-] stevefeinstein|9 years ago|reply
But in the history of the world, every time you conquer one disease, a worse and scarier one seems to fill the void. And if you wanted to get pedantic, it could be said that Humanity is a disease of the Earth. Eliminating that infestation might qualify under the goal. Perhaps AI is not going to solve the problem by eliminating disease, but eliminating that which can be diseased. Kill the prey, and the predator dies.
[+] [-] pkaye|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vegabook|9 years ago|reply
Mark Zuckerberg is worth 55 billion dollars. This is 5% of his net worth.
Mark Zuckerberg spent 20bn on Whatsapp. At his 28% shareholding in facebook that's a 5.6bn USD personal commitment.
The top 5 global pharma companies spent 42 billion USD on R&D in 2015 alone. Total pharma sector R&D is circa 200 yards. Every singe year. They aren't anywhere near "curing all diseases". This intiative would fund them for 5 days.
Very generous, but let's keep some perspective.
[+] [-] karmicthreat|9 years ago|reply
So what if a big leap in computational biology happened? Making faster machines is relatively easier and largely unregulated.
So you focus on simulating disease and some form of automation that tries to cure it. We have the problem of building these models for the computer to crunch on. So why not build them from people. Continuously monitor everything about someone. DNA, the various omics, self reports. All the while machine learning is trying learn these models. So other automations can change them.
So the first thing we need is a way to collect all this data. Itself a major medical breakthrough. How much data do we need to build the models? This seems to be the first breakthrough we need to even approach this.
[+] [-] 2pointsomone|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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